Friday, February 23, 2018

The blood bank is something we take for granted now, but it
wasn’t always so. As a researcher and surgeon, Dr. Charles Drew revolutionized
the understanding of plasma, the liquid portion of blood without cells. Plasma
lasts much longer than whole blood, making it possible to be “banked” for long
periods of time.

As a young man, Drew was an exceptional athlete, starring in
football, baseball, basketball and track and field at Washington, D.C.’s,
Dunbar High School. He was an All-American halfback at Amherst College in
Massachusetts and captain of the track team. But he couldn’t afford medical
school in the United States and attended McGill University in Montreal. He
later moved back to the United States and taught at Howard University’s medical
school.

After becoming the first African-American to get his
doctorate from Columbia University in 1940, Drew was the world’s leading
authority on blood transfusions and storage, just as the United States and
Great Britain were becoming deeply involved in World War II. His research
established protocols on how blood should be collected and refrigerated, how
donors should be recruited and screened, and training methods for people who
would collect and test blood.

As medical director of the American Red Cross National Blood
Donor Service, Drew led the collection of tens of thousands of pints of blood
for U.S. troops. Some historians say his work might have saved the world from
Nazism, since battlefield blood storage and transfusions didn’t exist before he
was asked to manage two of the largest blood banks during the war.

Even so, the U.S. military ruled that the blood of
African-Americans would be segregated and not used on white troops, although
blood has no racial characteristics. Outraged, Drew resigned from the Red Cross
and returned to Howard as a professor and head of surgery at Freedman’s
Hospital in Washington, D.C., where he trained a generation of black physicians.

He died in 1950 at the age of 45 in a car accident in
Burlington, North Carolina, while returning from a clinic at Tuskegee Institute
in 1950. Today, according to the Red Cross, there are 15.7 million blood
donations a year in the United States from 9.2 million donors. – John X. Miller